Fabrizio Ferrari - Tips & Insights from the Music Room expert

• Tips & Insights from the Music Room

What is the new "Smart Transposer"

A new tool for all musicians

In this new video, Virtual Sheet Music's CEO, Fabrizio Ferrari, shows how the new Playground's "Smart Transposer" feature works and can help with sheet music preparation.

Released on October 9, 2024

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DISCLAIMER: The views and the opinions expressed in this video are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Virtual Sheet Music and its employees.

Video Transcription

Hello and welcome.

Today I'm going to talk about the new Smart Transposer feature we have introduced with the last version of our Playground sheet music online editor, version 1 .7.

This new feature is something special because it can help a great deal in transposing from one instrument to another.

Specifically, not only it keeps the notes inside the note range of the target instrument, but it is able to remove the chords if you are transposing from a polyphonic instrument like a piano or a violin to a monophonic instrument like a flute or a clarinet.

And it doesn't end there, so let me show you how it works.

Alright, so if you head to virtualsheemuse .com slash Playground, you will find the Playground starting page and you can just click on the Playground button to launch the Playground.

Once you are inside, you can see there are some demo pieces that are shown. You can choose one of those from here.

So let's start with the first one, the Audit to Joy by Beethoven for violin and piano.

Now let's say that I want to change these to be played with a trumpet. As you can see, I have a chord here. I have two notes, two Ds, and of course with the trumpet you cannot play a chord like that. So I'm going to go into the Instruments panel and select the target instrument. So from a violin I'm changing to trumpet. So I'm going to do trumpet in B flat. So I'm done and as you can see the part has been transposed of course and the last chord has been removed.

This is a very simple thing. Okay, let's try something more complex. Let's take this amazing grace for string quartet and let's say you want to make this string quartet become a four clarinet quartet. All clarinets in B flat. I'm going to go inside the Instruments panel again. I'm going to change these to clarinet in Bb and B flat. So clarinet in Bb and clarinet in Bb and another clarinet in Bb.

Okay, I'm done and now as you can see I can play this piece with four clarinets in Bb. Everything has been kept inside the note range and just it's going just to work just fine.

Okay, let's try something even more challenging like Ave Maria for voice and piano and I want to play it with the flute and a bassoon in place of the piano.

As you can imagine we will need to remove all the chords and keep most of the melodic line for the bassoon to match. Keep in mind that this is not an arranger, an automatic arranger feature, it is a transposer. So it doesn't change the notes, it doesn't rearrange the music actually.

It just transposes the instrument in such a way and simplifies it in such a way that can be playable by the targeted instrument. Okay, so I'm going inside the Instruments panel.

I'm going to choose flute, the target for the voice part and for the piano I'm going to choose the bassoon.

Okay and here is how the magic gets applied. As you can see the bassoon part has been written from the piano, octave lines has been added. Of course it can be adjusted, I mean you can do that with an external notational program for now. In the future you will be able to edit the music directly here, I mean the notes directly here, but for now you can just choose export and then import the music as a music XML file into an external notational program. But most of the times you end up having already something that you can use. Okay let's try the Silent Night for guitar solo. As you can see chords everywhere. Let's say I want to just have it for a flute, so very simple instrument, monophonic.

So I'm going to change the guitar to a flute and then I'm done.

And you can see all the chords have been removed and you end up having just the melody, the melodic line, you can play it with a flute.

Okay something else I want to show you is how you can easily transpose music for example for violin to viola or cello. Because you know all the stringed instruments like violin, viola and cello, they have four strings and the only difference in notation is that the viola is tuned one fifth lower and the cello is actually one octave and one fifth lower than violin or one octave lower than viola, right? So you basically can keep for changing from the violin and the viola the positions are pretty much the same, exactly the same actually, and even fingerings are the same. So I don't have any fingerings here but if I had fingerings here I can use the same fingerings that works on the violin, working on the viola as well.

So let's say I want to transpose this from the violin to the viola, okay? So I'm gonna choose viola and when I click done the playground is asking me for a perfect match with the viola, would you like to transpose one fifth lower? If I hit yes, okay, it's going to transpose the music one fifth lower for me automatically and also suggesting that if all the instruments are too low or too high I may need to adjust the transposition of those instruments. So let me show you what it means. As you can see the violin part has been transposed to viola and the piano part has been transposed one fifth lower as well but of course some notes are probably too low so I can get back into the instruments panel and I can change this octave setting to transpose the piano part one octave higher.

Of course the smart transposition feature has been disabled because in this case you decide where to put the piano part and then you click done. As you can see the piano part has been transposed one octave higher and the viola hasn't been touched so you can easily play this piece on the viola.

The chord has been preserved because the viola can play this chord very easily. Going deeper with this string to string transposition idea let me show you with something more complex. For example we have recently published this version of a Colnidri for violin and viola. This has been already enabled into the playground so I can open it inside the playground and I have the violin at the top and the viola at the bottom. As you can see I have also violin fingerings here.

Let's say I want to make this duet for two violas so I'm going to change the top violin to viola and also notice that I have string indication here like this passage should be played on the A string on the violin.

But of course if I'm going to change the violin part to a viola part despite the fingerings are going to stay the same these indications are going to change because the second string on the viola is no longer the A string but is going to be the D string okay so I'm going to go inside the instrument panel again and changing violin to viola.

Let's keep the smart of course check on and click done. Now it's asking me again if I want to do a perfect match with the viola I'm going to choose yes of course and as you can see the music has been transposed the string has been changed and the fingerings have been kept.

Now just to conclude this demo I want to show you what if I want to change the viola the first viola part with the wind instrument so let's say clarinet in B flat so we will need to remove all the fingerings all the string indications and of course all the chords so I'm going into instrument again choosing clarinet in place of the viola here and then hit done and now I have a clarinet part already to play you see fingerings have been removed the string indication also chords have been removed all that way. Now what's important to understand is everything is reversible so if you want to get back to the original instrument like in this the violin in this case I just click the reset button right here and click done and the music will be back to its initial state.

Alright so that's it about the smart transposing feature just remember that the system is still experimental so we keep improving it so if you find anything not working as expected or any bugs please report everything inside the feedback form just click on the feedback button right here and leave your feedback right here and and we'll get back to you right away and we'll try to fix any problems as soon as we can.

Well alright so what do you think are you going to try it? I really recommend so anyway let me know what you think post your comments below or send an email to tipsandinsightsatvirtualshamuise .com and I'll be happy to answer any questions you may have.

Alright so I'm done for today and I'll see you in the next one.
Automatic video-to-text transcription by DaDaScribe.com
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